Inspection, service, maintenance and repair of equipment, whether it is an individual piece of equipment or an entire fleet, often requires a large investment of money and time. Performing such activities are not an option for those whose business rely on the continued operation of the equipment in their fleet. In order to keep equipment in good working order, regular inspection, service, maintenance and repair are a must. In some instances, regular equipment inspection and service are required by governmental regulations. For example, all commercial busses and trucks are required by Federal and State law to have a driver vehicle inspection report completed prior to each days use. Records of the daily inspection must be kept for a specified period of time in order to allow regulatory agencies to audit the reports. As one can imagine, the storage and organization of the inspection reports can become quite cumbersome. Another example in which equipment inspection is mandatory is related to aircraft. More specifically, all aircraft are required by Federal Aviation Administration regulations to have a physical pre-flight inspection prior to every flight. However, the process of performing the inspection does not need to be documented. As a result, the inspection is often cursory. Where the pilot may not be attentive, and the inspection is performed from memory, inspection points on the aircraft may be completely missed. Thus, in some instances, regular inspection, service, maintenance, and repair of a fleet of equipment is required and not an option.
Owners of a fleet of equipment are also driven by economic reasons to regularly perform inspection, service, maintenance and repair of their equipment. It is well recognized that regular equipment inspection and service can be helpful in prolonging the operating life of the equipment. Additionally, recording the inspection and service history can provide valuable information that may be used during failure analysis of equipment break-down and the subsequent repair. That is, having a history of the equipment can be used to determine a failure mode and expedite repair. However, as previously discussed, recording and maintaining documentation related to the regular inspection and service of equipment can be a daunting proposition, especially where the fleet of equipment is large and/or complex.
Thus, taking the traditional approach to tracking and recording equipment information for a fleet of equipment introduces a whole host of problems. There are problems related to the cumbersome nature of maintaining and organizing documentation related to the inspection, service, maintenance, and repair of the equipment. Documents require space for storage and are difficult to manage when the number of documents is large. Documents are easily misplaced or destroyed. Technology has been leveraged to some degree in addressing some of the issues that have arisen when taking the traditional approach to tracking and recording equipment information for a fleet of equipment. For example, information recorded on the documents are often transferred into a computer system where the data can be easily manipulated and stored in a organized manner. However, many hours are spent entering the recorded data from documents into a computer system where the recorded data can be analyzed. The additional costs of employing people to simply transfer data from the documents to a computer system are in many cases prohibitive and many businesses are unwilling to bear the additional expense.
Other problems related to the traditional approach include incomplete or cursory inspection procedures, as well as lost documentation. For example, in many cases the process of inspecting equipment in the field is performed from the memory of the individual performing the inspection. This situation presents several problems. The individual inspecting the equipment may become distracted during the inspection and forget at what point the inspection was interrupted, thus, when resuming the inspection, an area of the equipment that should been inspected is overlooked. Also, it is generally the case that without an inspection checklist, an individual is more likely to rush through the inspection process and not perform the inspection of the equipment with the level of scrutiny required. Even where an inspection checklist is provided, and an inspection report completed, there is no guarantee that the report will in fact be turned in and filed away. Inspection reports can be lost or accidentally destroyed, this may especially be the case where the inspection is performed in the field.
Therefore, there is a need for an alternative system and method for tracking and recording equipment information related to inspection, service, maintenance, and repair for a fleet of equipment.